Timing Your Blog Posts Is Everything When Improving Traffic…Or Is It?

I read an interesting post over at Jeff Kee’s blog about timing your posts according to the hours in the day when your traffic begins to spike. Jeff’s traffic begins to increase at around 9:00am…similar to that of my blog. It gets heavy around lunch…and tapers off through the evening…and resurges late at night. Same as mine…same as most blogs, I speculate.

While this may play a role in how much traffic you can attract, I subscribe to the idea that your title plays the most important role in attracting traffic — creativity will lure new readers, and substance will land you a comfy spot atop the search engine results.

Early Bird Gets The Traffic, right?
I generally try to post my “worthwhile” stuff at 5:30am CST. If I post one of those the night before (usually right before or right after midnight), I’ll usually set the timestamp to 5:30am. Then, I resubmit my sitemap with the hopes of getting listed first on the search engines. Doing so has occasionally resulted in noticeable traffic from Google. Search results will pick up my blog as a Top 10 result in the early morning hours (I get this info from my Google Analytics and my Webmasters tools), but I get overrun by the big boys after about that 8:00-9:00 timeframe. While I haven’t figured out how to remain atop the search results, I do get the early birds…and posting so early helps me catch all timezones. If any of you SEO experts have any suggestions, my ears are open.

Speaking of jumping in early, I posted a couple of stories regarding the Superbowl XLI commercials — one before the Superbowl about what to expect and revisiting the great commercials of the past and another RIGHT AFTER the Superbowl about how disappointed I was. My Google Analytics the following morning went from 5.45% of traffic to 48.32% of my traffic…people doing searches for “Superbowl XLI Commercials” according to my Google Webmasters tool (sorry, I wish I could post some cool charts and graphs, but I’m limited on software at work).

To Post or Not To Post?
Another thing I’ve always wondered about is how quickly I should get something up. I mean…I don’t spend alot of time contemplating this. When I get an idea, I generally post it up as soon as I get to my computer, especially the videos I find with the hopes of beating everyone to the punch. Since I primarily post links to those on a few forums on which I frequently post, I want to be ahead of the curve there. Same applies for breaking news. But getting back to timing…the reason I even ask the question is because I wonder if I ruin my readers’ rhythm. If they expect a new post early in the morning and start throwing stuff up randomly, will I lose readers? I know. Sounds a little ridiculous, but it could be true.

Anyway, when you get a chance, read Jeff’s post Timing Your Blog Posts and Diggs. It definitely made me think about whether or not timing is everything to improve your traffic.

Here are a few other posts I found that visit this topic as well as how to improve traffic:

• Timing Is Everything at Performancing.com
• 21 Tactics To Increase Blog Traffic at SEOmoz.org
• How To Market Your Blog In 2007 at problogger.net

Best of luck to all of you in your quest for more traffic…and leave me some comments, people. Suggestions? Tips? Experiences? Please?

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Related posts:

1. Getting My Blog Started Has Been A Learning Experience
2. February Brought More Than Just AdSense Revenue
3. I’m Too Sexy For This Blog
4. Superbowl XLI Commercials, Take 2
5. Blog Money — July 2007